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Adaptive Refractive Cloaking
* * * (stolen and reverse engineered)|status = In use}}The Adaptive Refractive Cloak, also known as ARC, is a stealth feature employed by a select few types of American aircraft enabling highly advanced active camouflage and the ability to vanish from most types of radar and sensors. History ARC was developed in the late 2010s alongside the ACS-2 Aquila-class stealth command jet, intended to function specifically with it. This stealth craft was designed specifically for the cloak, in order to maximize its capabilities. In 2029, the highly advanced terrorist junta CLAW was revealed to have somehow acquired and subsequently reverse engineered the technology to the point where it was able to be put on small aircraft, eliminating the size and power production shortcomings that had made it more restrictive for American aircraft. One prototype existed where the technology was able to be miniaturized to the point a person could wear it, but it was too full of drawbacks to be effective. It had succeeded in installing the ARC system aboard several stolen V-25 jump jets.One of these jets was captured by the Liberators-830B team in 2029, and the reverse engineering was reverse engineered. One of the recovered jets was stripped of CLAW insignia and returned to Coalition service, but kept its ARC cloaking system installed. Later on, Charlie Lang's Hades Protocol resulted in a skilled team of technicians being able to adapt CLAW's reverse engineered and improved cloak to be deployed on an ACS-1 Citadel-class aerial battleship. Testing has begun on the re-reverse engineered tech to see if it can be applied to F-35 Tridents or a future generation of fighter or reconnaissance aircraft. Characteristics The ARC system is capable of fully actively camouflaging an aircraft through the use of distortion field emitters and specialized hull panels. Emitters built into the skin of an aircraft's air frame, coupled with cameras and highly advanced and powerful processing computers allow the aircraft to project an image of the opposite side of itself on any given side, the 'see through effect' viewable from any angle thanks to multi-faceted refractive projection technology. When activated, an aircraft will be enveloped in a wave of flickering patterns (from the hull panels activating) that sweep over the ship until it cloaks and becomes literally invisible (unless seen at a fairly close distance, then one can make out the imperfect distortions, the outline and contours of the aircraft, and the projection panels and gaps between them). Originally, the power requirements were immense to use and the matrix had to be painstakingly configured. CLAW's capture and reverse-engineering and improvements to the technology found a much more efficient series of pathways and matrix generation programming, enabling the cloak to be applied to a much wider variety of hull shapes at a fraction of the power cost of the original. If used properly and under optimal conditions, an ARC system can completely hide oneself from all but the most advanced and cutting edge of sensor and radar technology. Comparable stealth technology and spells: * RAF Taliesin cloaking system * Ilyushin-104 Airborne Guided Missile Battlecruiser stealth system * Mists of Annwn